Summer Plans, a story (beginning) of Addergoole & the apocalypse

written to inventrix's prompt. Year 17 of the Addergoole School.

The teachers had been on edge all year. Dáin figured it had something to do with the stuff that had been happening when he came to school - portals opening to other worlds, people disappearing and reappearing, miracles and horrid things all over the world, if the news was to be believed at all. But the news didn't come through - no TV came through at all, down in Addergoole. The older kids said it used to work, but something about the shifting wards or the weather patterns had turned out to mess with any incoming signal. Phones to the outside didn't work well either, if they worked at all.

The teachers being on edge had bothered Dáin more than the lack of contact. Addergoole had this way of sucking you in, making you forget about the outside world. He'd barely thought about his parents, just enough to send them a couple slightly-guilty letters. He'd thought about his old boyfriend even less, and the letter he'd sent him had been a lot more guilty.

Mostly, though, Dáin had been pretty engrossed in his first year of school. There had been magic to learn, an awkward Change to handle, his Keeper to, uh, be Kept by, and the rest of his classmates to mostly-try-not-to-bother, as per orders.
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Flight, a ficlet of Addergoole (@dahob)

Written in response to a lovely picture @dahob showed me - here.

She hadn't meant to run - to flee, that is. Drifa hadn't really been meaning to do anything, not consciously. The pain had come, and she'd been trying to get away from it. A little walking, that would help. A little running, maybe that would help more. She hadn't noticed for a good twenty minutes that she wasn't running, she was flying. She hadn't noticed until she landed that she was wearing a sheet and nothing else.

Crows were landing all around her, settling in the snow and cawing questions at her. Drifa cleared her throat and answered. "Lost," she told them, "new-fledged." It was close enough, and none of them questioned her size.

Nor did they question her nudity in the snow, but, then again, they were all nude in the snow, too. And neither she nor they thought it was strange that she could both understand them and talk to them.

It seemed the crows knew more strangeness than they wanted to admit: They understood where she had come from. But none of them would show her the way back.